A commercial telecommunications network operated by a service provider supports voice and data communications between customer locations and includes an access network and a core network. Generally, customer devices communicatively couple to the access network, which in turn connects to the core network. The access network includes what many people refer to as “the last mile,” that is, the connectivity from a customer location, such as an office building, to a point where a service provider has significant facilities, such as a metro hub or a “service edge” at the periphery of the core network. In contrast to the access network, the core network usually provides transport of large aggregate flows over long distances and handles the selective routing of each customer's voice and data traffic to other locations served by the network. The access network generally comprises a series of switches, aggregators, multiplexers, demultiplexers, routers, hubs, and the like which collectively serve to provide connectivity between customers' equipment and the core network.
The services required by customers, residential or business, vary greatly in the type of access services, bandwidth, quality of service (QoS), type of legacy equipment, and the like. Types of services typically include frame relay services, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) services, broadband services, and the like. Typically, an access network provides switching or routing of some nature for each of these types of services independently, which in turn requires the access service provider to provision each of these services separately. In particular, the access service provider must be capable of meeting the customer's current and future needs in terms of bandwidth, QoS, and the like.
Generally, each type of service utilizes different interface and framing standards, and in particular, each type of service typically utilizes a different set of protocols. As a result, current access network elements must be equipped to interface with and operate upon flows for each type of service the elements are expected to handle. Each network element in an access network presently must deal with the particular format, addressing and protocol aspects of each type of access communication service it supports. This makes for costly and complex network elements and interferes with having flexibility to accommodate rapid shifts in resources allocated to different flows or different service types and to accommodate adoption of new service types. Accordingly, there is a need for a switch, or other access network elements, to process flows conforming to a variety of service types and to route or switch traffic flows between a large number of customer premise equipments and one or more service edges. There is also a need for such a network element to manage and process flows in a manner that enhances scalability of the access network in handling a large number of flows. This includes the managing and processing of real-time flows that require expeditious handling, such as packet telephony signals.